At no point in the months-long construction of his sea snail-shaped structure did artist Mark Antony Haden Ford think his art looked like anything but an aquatic creature.
But to some folks, the piece’s spiral shape resembles the poop emoji more than what was intended: a type of sea snail called a periwinkle.
“This was an intentional sculpture,” Ford told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. “[But] spirals occur in nature, right? So it can be interpreted as another thing.”
Ford says the artwork was commissioned by the local government in Chichester, England, to celebrate the Medmerry Nature Reserve that the installation sits on. Like much of Ford and his wife Rebecca’s sculptures, it was made from woven willow branches.
The goal was to create a structure that visitors of the reserve could walk into for shelter from the elements. “There’s no shelter at all. …